Thursday, August 1, 2013

Susan Jacoby, Anthony Weiner: The Sexter & the Sextees . . .

For reasons that perhaps have less to do with her copious writings
than with sexism, she is not, so far as media is concerned, on the A-list of
New Atheists, but is nevertheless a learned and passionate advocate ofsecularism, and, more than her male
peers — Hitchens, Dawkins et al — a chronicler of its authentic but embattled
position in American history, from Thomas Paine on.

I define myself as a secularist. I think it's rather
sophomoric to ask if God exists, and so prefer not to use the label
"atheist", which gives the question more import than I think it
deserves. I suppose I am a paleo-atheist, having arrived at my position before
the neo-atheists made their debut.

In any case, Jacoby has published an op-ed in today's NY
Times ("Weiner’s Women", 7/31/13) that gives me several kinds of
pause. Jacoby wants to shift the media spotlight from Weiner and his digital
antics to the women who welcomed them. (Let's recall that Weiner has not been
accused of harassment: those to whom he sexted were, so far as we know, willing
sextees [sic]).

Of course, one crucial difference between the sexter and the
sextees in this case leaps out immediately: the women to whom Weiner displayed
himself were not running for mayor of New York City. Their character — cupidity,
trustworthiness, addictivenessand pathology, if any— did
not, therefore, become paramount.

So we have one difference between "Weiner's Women"
and Weiner.

Jacoby goes on to ask:

Why is [Weiner] called a pervert while Sydney Leathers’s
statement [Leathersbeing a noted
sextee] that their Internet contact progressed to phone sex twice a week — “a
fantasy thing for both of us,” she told one tabloid TV show — is greeted with
neutral, if not exactly respectful, attention?

From that point on, Jacoby goes on to sound, uncomfortably,
like an advocate for Women Against Pornography. She's not, but cuts it close.
At the very least she's no fan of new media and the possibilities for sexual
fantasy that are born with.

She writes: What’s truly troubling about the whole business
is that it resembles the substitution of texting for extended, face-to-face
time with friends.

There's something to that.

D. H. Lawrence would approve.

Then she writes:

Virtual sex is to sex as virtual food is to food: you can’t
taste, touch or smell it, and you don’t have to do any preparation or work.

Wrong.

You can't live on the thought of bread. With sex, it's
different. You can actually have virtual sex. Sometimes thoughts of sex, if
shared, are sex.s

What Jacoby proposes, in effect, is to subtract fantasy from
sex: only touch and smell should count. That's old school, if not a tad
priggish. Touch and smell in and of themselves may completely suffice for some,
and perhaps did for her.

For many of us, though, a sprinkle of fantasy spices the
touch and smell up.

This was true well before sexting.

New media always abets the power to articulate fantasy and
fetish.

There is a section in France's Biblioteque National called
L'enfer. Off limits to most visitors, until recently, anyway, it housed the
kind of pornographic material thought to be a dubious by-product of print.

The fantasy Jacoby seems toharbor is one of a sexual world in which fantasy plays no
part.